Photographer Amanda Lucidon had a front-row seat to the events in the Obama White House. For four years, Lucidon was the only female photographer on the White House staff and tasked with covering first lady Michelle Obama. “To be one of the few female photographers in [White House] history was really special. But on top of that, just to work for the administration that had appointed more women and minorities than any other administration; that was a real special thing,” Lucidon said in an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts for “Good Morning America.”

Lucidon, 38, is stepping out from behind the lens for the first time and sharing her personal reflections in a new book, “Chasing Light.” The book is a collection of her candid photographs of the first family and is filled with the lessons she learned along the way. “What the first lady has traveled around the country and the world saying candidly, which I learned from her, is that you can be anything; how you grew up and your circumstances do not define you,” Lucidon told Roberts. “Working at the White House was a very transformative time for me. I found confidence. I learned about myself. I learned about pushing boundaries. I learned about embracing my own story and my own background. … The first lady always taught us the challenges that you’ve encountered in your life are actually your strengths. They’re not your weaknesses. They’re the things that teach you resilience.”

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Meet the Trumpkins
A crop of Republicans are betting that a Trump-style mix of crassness and white grievance will bring them victory in 2018.

by Saahil Desai

As of late September, Donald Trump had the lowest approval rating of any president that far into his first term. Yet there has been remarkably little atrophy among Trump’s base. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from the same month found that 98 percent of Trump primary voters approve of the president’s job performance. Among Americans who support Trump, 61 percent don’t envision anything that would change their favorable opinion of him. A majority of Republican voters consider themselves primarily loyal to the president rather than to the Republican Party.

It’s no wonder, then, that 2018 GOP primaries are devolving into fights about which candidate in the race is most closely aligned with the Trump agenda. Take the Arizona Senate race: Jeff Flake, the incumbent, who refused to endorse Trump and wrote a book earlier this year excoriating the president, is facing a tough primary challenger in Kelli Ward, who has positioned herself as an unwavering partner to the president. Steve Bannon, back at Breitbart after being ousted from the White House, is scheming to cultivate Trump allies to challenge establishment Republican incumbents with help from the billionaire Robert Mercer, who has already pumped $300,000 into a Super PAC affiliated with Ward’s campaign.

In the murky sea of 2018 GOP candidates, the most fascinating creatures are the ones trying to capture the secret sauce that propelled Trump from laughingstock to president. Trump’s crudeness didn’t deter as many voters as pundits anticipated and Democrats hoped; nor did his embrace of the politics of white racial resentment. Down-ballot candidates have taken notice. Elements of Trump’s brand of populism are surfacing in various configurations among two types of opportunists: longtime vulgarians emboldened to run for higher office by the president’s success, and establishment politicians eager to rebrand themselves to ride Trump’s appeal among the GOP base.

The widow of a soldier who died in Niger earlier this month says a Facebook post circulating under her name defending US President Donald Trump is fake.

Myeshia Johnson says the post criticising Congresswoman Frederica Wilson – who has been in a war of words with Mr Trump – was written by someone claiming to be her.

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ABC journalist Michael Del Moro tweeted confirmation of the now debunked post. He told the BBC: “Myeshia Johnson confirmed this post was fake to me in person”

Fact checking site Snopes explains that while the date of the post corresponds with the day President Trump made the call to Mrs Johnson, the time does not: “The time listed is actually more than an hour before the reported time of President Trump’s phone call, which was 4.45pm Eastern time.”

I tell you that this country is moving slowly towards fascism. So now we have a situation where Putin gets to dictate who can and cannot visit the U.S.? Really? Putin’s Puppet is fully in control and showing it.

She stood her ground against Trump. Bravo!! I can’t imagine what she’s going through right now. I really wish Trump hadn’t called her in the first place since he lacks empathy and decorum. He’s not fit to hold any position in the White House.

It’s appears that Sgt. Johnson must have been brutally tortured beyond recognition. Still, I feel that his widow should have been allowed to view his body, no matter how horrific the condition it was in. Without viewing his remains, how will she ever come to closure that the person she buried was truly her beloved husband? I think it’s cruel for the government to deny the widow of a fallen soldier to touch her husband and say goodbye to him; especially since it took the U.S. military two days before his remains were discovered. Moreover, were the other three men killed with Sgt. Johnson buried in closed caskets? If not why is Sgt. Johnson an exception?

For me, here is a nagging question that keeps running through my mind: What if the body in that closed casket was not that of Sgt. Johnson?

Wow. This is beyond sad. I feel so sorry for Mrs. Johnson given all that she’s going through right now. Times like these are when we need a good Consoler-in-Chief instead of an idiot without a drop of empathy.

“The EPA is expanding Pruitt’s security detail with an additional 12 agents, meaning his total security fleet stands at 30 bodyguards. This will cost the department $2 million a year in salaries alone and does not include training, equipment or travel. Pruitt also installed a $25,000 soundproof communications booth this year. While Pruitt expands his spending Trump’s budget blueprint would cut the EPA’s funds by more than 30 percent.”

From me: they sure love spending tax dollars, which they likely do not contribute to.

Jerk at airport just told me Ms. Johnson's account of Trump call is "bullshit." Me: How do you know? Him: "They released the recording of the call." Me: They did not. Him: "It's on the Internet." Me: It's not. Him: "It is." Me: Bet you $50. Him: Silence.

It’s interesting that Bannon left the White House but is even more powerful within the GOP now. And look at the cretins he hangs around with in public. You can just imagine the garbage human beings he communicates with in private.

Donald Trump called for the deportation of a Chinese dissident living in the US, after receiving a request from Beijing hand-delivered by a casino owner with business interests in China, according to a US report.

The Wall Street Journal described a Chinese government attempt to put pressure on Guo Wengui, a real estate tycoon living in exile in New York, to halt his allegations of corruption in high places in China.

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Guo has filed an application for political asylum in the US, which is pending. But according to the Journal’s account, Trump called for Guo’s deportation in a discussion on policy towards China, describing him as a “criminal” at an Oval Office policy meeting in June, on the basis of a letter from Beijing accusing him of serious crimes.

The report said the letter had been hand-delivered to him at a private dinner by Steve Wynn, a Las Vegas casino magnate and Republican National Committee finance chairman with interests in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau, for which Wynn relies on Beijing for licensing.

………………………….

The Journal report said that aides tried to persuade Trump out of going ahead with Guo’s deportation, noting he was a member of the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. The aides later ensured that the deportation would not go ahead.

Armed Forces Commander General Gatot Nurmantyo was about to board a flight on Saturday when the airline informed him that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection had denied him entry, military spokesman Wuryanto told a news conference in Jakarta.

Nurmantyo was going to the United States at the invitation of General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to attend a Chiefs of Defense Conference on Countering Violent Extremism being held in Washington on Oct. 23-24, Wuryanto said.

It was not clear why he was stopped from entering the United States, Wuryanto said, adding that the general did not have any problem during his visit to the United States in February 2016.

In the sorriest days of the Watergate scandal, the iconoclastic journalist and 60 Minutes commentator Nicholas von Hoffman compared the Nixon presidency to “a dead mouse on the American family kitchen floor. The question is: who is going to pick it up by the tail and drop it in the trash?” It would be premature to write off the Trump presidency as a deceased rodent lying on the linoleum. In its nasty defensiveness, it is closer to a cornered rat. It still has plenty of ugly fight left. But we are at the beginning of the endgame and it is not premature to start imagining how to pick through the damage the Trump presidency will leave behind and future-proof the republic so that It Can’t Happen Here never happens again. So much headspace will be opened up once Trump is no longer occupying it that we must make the most of it.

The moment Trump leaves the White House for early retirement, jail, a sanitarium, or a Russian refuge, let the reckoning begin. Cue the exodus of his cronies from the Cabinet and commence the shunning…Post-Trump, the country needs its own, domestic version of the de-Nazification program established in Germany after World War II, an inquiry into how so many alleged neo-Nazi, white-supremacist sympathizers had input into this presidency, and their connection with neo-Nazi and nativist movements overseas.

Ivana Trump said the first step for America to regain respect is adopting the billionaire’s immigration policies.

“And I’m an immigrant,” said Ivana, who was born in the Czech Republic.

“As long as you come here legally and get a proper job … we need immigrants. Who’s going to vacuum our living rooms and clean up after us? Americans don’t like to do that,” she added.

The Republican presidential front-runner’s first wife insisted she has “nothing against Mexicans.”

“But if they [come] here — like this 19-year-old, she’s pregnant, she crossed over a wall that’s this high. She gives birth in American hospital, which is for free. The child becomes American automatically,” she said. “She brings the whole family, she doesn’t pay the taxes, she doesn’t have a job, she gets housing, she gets the food stamps. Who’s paying? You and me.”

GM, TOD ohana.
Another sexual predator and his hostile organization has fallen. John Besh, the new Orleans based chef and restauranteur, has left his organization to “focus on family” after the Times Pecayune published articles with interviews from at least 9 people who had suffered sexual harassment in the workplace. This, like Hollywood, is an industry-wide problem that has been going on for decades, and finally a respected news outlet has given time and space to listen to survivors’ stories and get them out there. Besh has a PBS cooking show that I watched for years. He presents himself as a dedicated family man, has had his sons on the show over the years, and tries to present himself as just a down home Southern boy, when he has actually cooked from a one time US ambassador to France and owns restaurants all over the country in prime locations. The Times investigation started months ago and is independent of the Weinstein investigations. The ultimate justice is for the man who would be president to be brought down by those he has abused over the years. Everyday he is in office is a terrible affront to those he preyed upon and to all who have suffered such from other predators who are not so highly placed. His election told millions of women that we do not have the rights to our own bodies and that anyone who has any power over us can do as he/she chooses. While I am encouraged by the recent developments in which women are being heard and their abusers beginning to be called to account, as long as a confessed sexual predator is allowed to hold the highest office in the land and possibly the world, the message remains that women do not matter, that we are property to be used and discarded at the desire of any man who holds and real or perceived power over us.